MIDLAND — It’s not just oil and natural gas that comes out of the ground here. For every barrel of oil pumped to the surface, more than another barrel of water from deep within the earth comes up alongside it.

With a hue that ranges from gray to black and an odor that resembles gasoline, the water is typically pumped into disposal wells thousands of feet underground. All the while, hydraulic fracturing operations pull billions of gallons of fresh water a year from aquifers that also supply water to cities and farms.

With a years-long drought depleting water supplies across prime drilling areas in South and West Texas, pressure on oil and gas companies has been ramping up. Early indications are the industry is slowly turning toward recycling its own wastewater, along with highly salty and undrinkable brackish water, to curb the strain of the hydraulic fracturing boom.

Data is hard to come by. But estimates are that in places like the Eagle Ford and Permian Basin, 10 percent to 20 percent of the water being used now comes from recycling. And that number is expected to at least double over the next decade, said Marcus Gay, a water analyst at research firm IHS who has since left the company.

Apache Corp., the Houston-based oil company, says it is no longer using fresh water at a 35,000-acre field in the Wolfcamp, one of the region’s hottest oil plays. Water there is so scarce that residents in nearby Barnhart saw their town well go dry last year.

Fasken Oil and Ranch, located outside Midland, expects to be completely off fresh water by the end of the year. Spread across 165,000 acres of sand and shrubs, the ranch has seen some of its cattle wells go dry and has been slowly developing its water recycling operation.

Through an elaborate process that involves electrodes, chemical treatments and simple gravity, impurities are removed and what was once wastewater is piped into a holding pond the size of six football fields. Jimmy Davis Jr., who runs the oil and gas operations at Fasken, said it might be more expensive than buying fresh water, but not by much. And the Fasken family, which bought the land in 1913, is worried about how much water is left.

“This family’s going to have this land hundreds of more years,” he said. “The technology’s nothing new. It’s the same thing they’ve been using for years in Africa to clean the drinking water.”

Dropping aquifers

The timing is critical.

At the Texas Water Development Board, geologists are watching nervously as the state’s aquifers continue to shrink. Oil and gas represents only about 2 percent of the total water use. But because of the boom in hydraulic fracturing, which can use more than 4 million gallons per well, it’s a much larger number than it used to be.

And in some sections of the Eagle Ford, dramatic water losses are being reported. In La Salle County south of San Antonio, the local water board reported the aquifer had dropped 70 feet in a single year.

“There’s been large water-level declines in that area. A lot of it’s due to agriculture, but there’s been increased pumping for hydraulic fracturing that has caused a decline in the water levels, too,” said Robert Mace, deputy executive administrator at the state water board. “There’s an expectation the water use for hydraulic fracturing is only going to increase.”

If the drought persists, expectations are that water costs are only going to rise. In one part of New Mexico, water costs tripled last year. And companies are racing to fine-tune the technology to bring recycling costs on par with buying fresh water.

Clane LaCrosse, a 42-year-old former consultant in Fort Worth, started a water recycling operation around 2007 after an oil executive told him how much they were spending on water. For the first five years, business at Bosque Systems was slow at best, but things have quickly turned around, he said.

“They might be at 20 percent recycling right now, but they were at zero two years ago,” he said. “Customers are literally coming to us to say, ‘Help us out.’”

Economic costs

For now, though, wastewater recycling simply doesn’t make economic sense for a lot of companies.

The infrastructure costs, in terms of pipelines and treatment equipment, are considerable. And they multiply exponentially when wells must be hooked in across other property, requiring negotiations over right of way. That essentially limits recycling to large companies that can afford to lease large blocks of land or own it already.

Bill Mintz, spokesman for Apache, said that the decision to recycle in Barnhart was based on economics but that it does not yet make sense at most of the company’s operations in Texas.

“You can’t do this everywhere,” he said. “Water availability is a very local issue. There are places in the Permian, fresh water is readily available. But in the Barnhart area, fresh water is scarce, so if we could get it, it would be more expensive.”

Pressure from Austin and Washington, D.C., is only expected to increase in the years ahead.

Texas Railroad Commissioner Christi Craddick, a Midland native and former attorney to the oil industry, said that within five years she hopes to see larger oil and gas companies no longer using fresh water in Texas.

“I think that’s not an unrealistic number, at least for the large companies,” she said. “To me, water is the issue in the state. … If we don’t have water, we can’t grow our economy. It doesn’t matter what the industry is.”

Reducing usage

Companies are looking at all sorts of ways to reduce their water use.

Pioneer Natural Resources, an Irving-based oil company with large operations in the Eagle Ford and Permian, made a deal last month to use the city of Odessa’s sewage water in its drilling operations. And it’s in talks to buy Midland’s sewage.

Water ponds once allowed to evaporate under the hot summer sun are being covered up.

Oilfield services giant Halliburton has spent years developing a fracking fluid it says essentially eliminates the need to treat wastewater beforehand. Typically, fracking requires water purity close to that of tap water, or there’s a risk of blockages that can delay a job for days. The product, released last summer, already is generating buzz as a potential game-changer for the recycling industry.

The Faskens’ recycling operation has turned into a quasi-showroom for rival oil field managers to come by and contemplate what if.

Workers hold samples of the untreated wastewater in glass Mason jars up to the sun. And then four hours later, out comes a sample so clear one might fill a swimming pool with it.

“When you bring these jars out, their jaws hit the table,” said Tate McCarty, field supervisor for Water Rescue Services, a Fort Worth-based recycling company. “But it’s kind of like when a new car comes out. They’re like, ‘This is pretty cool, but I don’t know.’”

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